mick laBriola

Hamza Namira is an Egyptian singer-songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist.

Is this really the famous Pleaides star cluster? Known for its iconic blue stars, the Pleaides is shown here in infrared light where the surrounding dust outshines the stars. Here three infrared colors have been mapped into visual colors (R=24, G=12, B=4.6 microns). The base images were taken by NASA’s orbiting Wide Field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) spacecraft. Cataloged as M45 and nicknamed the Seven Sisters, the Pleiades star cluster is by chance situated in a passing dust cloud. The light and winds from the massive Pleiades stars preferentially repels smaller dust particles, causing the dust to become stratified into filaments, as seen. The featured image spans about 20 light years at the distance of the Pleiades, which lies about 450 light years distant toward the constellation of the Bull (Taurus).

Leland Bruce Sklar (born May 28, 1947) is an American musician. A prominent electric bass guitarist, Sklar has contributed to over 2,000 albums as a session musician. He has collaborated with a number of well-known performers and recorded soundtracks to films and television shows.

Sklar studied at California State University, Northridge. It was during that time he met James Taylor, who invited him to play bass at some venues. They both thought that the work would be short-term, but soon Taylor’s career took off with his first hit records, and Sklar came into the limelight. He was soon asked to record with others, and his long career began. In the 1970s, Sklar worked so frequently with drummer Russ Kunkel, guitaristDanny Kortchmar, and keyboardist Craig Doerge that they eventually became known as “The Section” and recorded three albums under that name between 1972 and 1977.

Russell Donald Freeman (May 28, 1926 in Chicago, Illinois – June 27, 2002 in Las Vegas, Nevada) was a bebop and cool jazz pianist and composer.

Initially, Freeman was classically trained. His reputation as a jazz pianist grew in the 1940s after working with Art Pepper and Shorty Rogers. He played with Charlie Parker on the 1947 “Home Cooking” jazz session. Numerous collaborations followed in the 1950s with Chet Baker, Shelly Manne, and Art Pepper. These collaborations included the Jazz Immortal CD recorded with Russ Freeman and jazz trumpeter Clifford Brown in 1954, which included leading musicians Brown and Zoot Sims. On the Jazz Immortal CD, Russ Freeman was able to play in a combo that recorded many Clifford Brown compositions.

Aaron Thibeaux “T-Bone” Walker (May 28, 1910 – March 16, 1975) was an American blues guitarist, singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist, who was a pioneer and innovator of the jump blues and electric blues sound. In 2011, Rolling Stone magazine ranked him number 67 on its list of “The 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time”.

Walker was born in Linden, Texas, of African-American and Cherokee descent. His parents, Movelia Jimerson and Rance Walker, were both musicians. His stepfather, Marco Washington, taught him to play the guitar, ukulele, banjo, violin, mandolin, and piano.

Walker began his career as a teenager in Dallas in the 1920s. His mother and stepfather (a member of the Dallas String Band) were musicians, and Blind Lemon Jefferson, a family friend, sometimes came over for dinner. Walker left school at the age of 10, and by 15 he was a professional performer on the blues circuit. Initially, he was Jefferson’s protégé and would guide him around town for his gigs. In 1929, Walker made his recording debut with Columbia Records, billed as Oak Cliff T-Bone, releasing the single “Wichita Falls Blues” backed with “Trinity River Blues”. Oak Cliff is the community in which he lived at the time, and T-Bone is a corruption of his middle name. The pianist Douglas Fernell played accompaniment on the record.

Riad Abdel-Gawad was born May 9, 1965 in Cairo, Egypt. He composes music and performs on the violin, which, although does not fit easily into any “box” or genre, points towards likely frontiers that music has taken and will take in the 21st-century.

Mali mourns music icon Kassé Mady Diabaté who died aged 69

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BBRgvuX2Aqo

Astronomers using data from ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT), at the Paranal Observatory in Chile, have made an impressive composite of the nebula Messier 17, also known as the Omega Nebula or the Swan Nebula. The painting-like image shows vast clouds of gas and dust illuminated by the intense radiation from young stars.

The image shows a central region about 15 light-years across, although the entire nebula is even larger, about 40 light-years in total. Messier 17 is in the constellation of Sagittarius (the Archer), about 6000 light-years from Earth. It is a popular target for amateur astronomers, who can obtain good quality images using small telescopes.

These deep VLT observations were made at near-infrared wavelengths with the ISAAC instrument. The filters used were J (1.25 µm, shown in blue), H (1.6 µm, shown in green), and K (2.2 µm, shown in red). In the centre of the image is a cluster of massive young stars whose intense radiation makes the surrounding hydrogen gas glow. To the lower right of the cluster is a huge cloud of molecular gas. At visible wavelengths, dust grains in the cloud obscure our view, but by observing in infrared light, the glow of the hydrogen gas behind the cloud can be seen shining faintly through. Hidden in this region, which has a dark reddish appearance, the astronomers found the opaque silhouette of a disc of gas and dust. Although it is small in this image, the disc has a diameter of about 20 000 AU, dwarfing our Solar System (1 AU is the distance between the Earth and the Sun). It is thought that this disc is rotating and feeding material onto a central protostar — an early stage in the formation of a new star.

Dee Dee Bridgewater (born May 27, 1950) is an American jazz singer. She is a three-time Grammy Award-winning singer-songwriter, as well as a Tony Award-winning stage actress. For 23 years, she was the host of National Public Radio’s syndicated radio show JazzSet with Dee Dee Bridgewater. She is a United Nations Ambassador for the Food and Agriculture Organization.

Born Denise Eileen Garrett in Memphis, Tennessee, she was raised Catholic in Flint, Michigan. Her father, Matthew Garrett, was a jazz trumpeter and teacher at Manassas High School, and through his playing, she was exposed to jazz early on. At the age of sixteen, she was a member of a rock and rhythm’n’blues trio, singing in clubs in Michigan. At 18, she studied at the Michigan State University before she went to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. With their jazz band, she toured the Soviet Union in 1969.

Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen (Danish pronunciation: [nelsˈhɛneŋ ˈɶɐ̯sdəð ˈpɛðɐsn̩], 27 May 1946 – 19 April 2005), often known as NHØP, was a Danish jazz upright bassist known for his technique and musical approach.

Ørsted Pedersen was born in Osted, near Roskilde, on the Danish island of Zealand, the son of a church organist. As a child, Ørsted Pedersen played piano, but from the age of 13, he started learning to play upright bass and at the age of 14, while studying, he began his professional jazz career in Denmark with his first band, Jazzkvintet 60 (Danish for ‘Jazz Quintet 60’). By the age of fifteen, he had the ability to accompany leading musicians at nightclubs, working regularly at Copenhagen’s Jazzhus Montmartre, after his debut there on New Year’s Eve 1961, when he was only 15. When seventeen, he had already turned down an offer to join the Count Basie orchestra, mainly because he was too young to get legal permission to live and work as a musician in the United States.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-F-agyY3dc

Ramsey Emmanuel Lewis Jr. (born May 27, 1935) is an American jazz composer, pianist and radio personality. Ramsey Lewis has recorded over 80 albums and has received seven gold records and three Grammy Awards so far in his career.

Ramsey Lewis was born in Chicago, Illinois, to Ramsey Lewis Sr. and Pauline Lewis. Lewis began taking piano lessons at the age of four. At 15 he joined his first jazz band, the Cleffs. The seven-piece group provided Lewis his first involvement with jazz; he would later join Cleffs drummer Isaac “Red” Holt and bassist Eldee Young to form the Ramsey Lewis Trio.

The trio started as primarily a jazz unit and released their first album, Ramsey Lewis and the Gentlemen of Swing, in 1956. Following their 1965 hit “The In Crowd” (the single reached No. 5 on the pop charts, and the album No. 2) they concentrated more on pop material. Young and Holt left in 1966 to form Young-Holt Unlimited and were replaced by Cleveland Eaton and Maurice White. White left to form Earth, Wind & Fire and was replaced by Morris Jennings in 1970. Later, Frankie Donaldson and Bill Dickens replaced Jennings and Eaton; Felton Crews also appeared on many 1980’s releases.

By 1966, Lewis was one of the nation’s most successful jazz pianists, topping the charts with “The In Crowd“, “Hang On Sloopy“, and “Wade in the Water“. All three singles each sold over one million copies, and were awarded gold discs. Many of his recordings attracted a large non-jazz audience. In the 1970s, Lewis often played electric piano, although by later in the decade he was sticking to acoustic and using an additional keyboardist in his groups.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9scvvfCsvaA

Clifford Everett “Bud” Shank, Jr. (May 27, 1926 – April 2, 2009) was an American alto saxophonist and flautist. He rose to prominence in the early 1950s playing lead alto and flute in Stan Kenton‘s Innovations in Modern Music Orchestra and throughout the decade worked in various small jazz combos. He spent the 1960s as a first-call studio musician in Hollywood. In the 1970s and 1980s, he performed regularly with the L. A. Four. Shank ultimately abandoned the flute to focus exclusively on playing jazz on the alto saxophone. He also recorded on tenor and baritone sax. He is also well known for the alto flute solo on the song “California Dreamin’” recorded by The Mamas & the Papas in 1965.

Bud Shank was born in Dayton, Ohio. He began with clarinet in Vandalia, Ohio, but had switched to saxophone before attending the University of North Carolina. While at UNC, Shank was initiated into the Pi Kappa Alpha Fraternity. In 1946 he worked with Charlie Barnet before moving on to Kenton and the West coast jazz scene.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tzXHm-Fn4I

Super Uba, a skilled vocalist from Santiago in the Dominican Republic, performs music that represents the island’s diverse musical culture. The band combines modern bachata guitar styles with classic son, bolero and merengue rhythms.

Ubaldo Cabrera was born to a farming family in the rural town of Guateque de la Isabela, near Puerto Plata. At age 19 he was drawn by his love for music to the city of Santiago, where he lived with an uncle who taught him to sing and play the guitar. Santiago is the heart of the Cibao, the northern region of the Dominican Republic which is the cradle of merengue. When Uba talks about the city as it was in the 1970s, he describes a culture where music thrived. “At that time, someone could go to an open air bar, or to a night club, and start playing, and if he was good, crowds would gather to listen to him.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5UZChH_OTI

This colourful image from ESO’s Very Large Telescope shows NGC 1055 in the constellation of Cetus (The Sea Monster).  This large galaxy is thought to be up to 15 percent larger in diameter than the Milky Way. NGC 1055 appears to lack the whirling arms characteristic of a spiral, as it is seen edge-on. However, it displays odd twists in its structure that were probably caused by an interaction with a large neighbouring galaxy.

NGC 1055 is an edge-on spiral galaxy located in the constellation Cetus that has a prominent nuclear bulge crossed by a wide, knotty, dark lane of dust and gas. The spiral arm structure appears to be elevated above the galaxy’s plane and obscures the upper half of the bulge. Discovered on December 19, 1783 by William Herschel from his home in Slough England.

It is a binary system together with the bright spiral galaxy M77 (NGC 1068). These two are the largest galaxies of a small galaxy group that also includes NGC 1073, and five other small irregular galaxies.

NGC 1087, NGC 1090, and NGC 1094 appear close, but they simply appear in the field of view and are background galaxies.

Based on the published red shift, (Hubble Constant of 62 km/s per Mpc) a rough distance estimate for NGC 1055 is 52 million light-years, with a diameter of about 115,800 light-years. The separation between NGC 1055 and M77 is about 442,000 light-years.

NGC 1055 is a bright infrared and radio source, particularly in the wavelength for warm carbon monoxide. Astronomers believe that this results from unusually active star formation. It most likely has a transitional nucleus, however, there is a small chance that it could be a LINER.

Stephanie Lynn Nicks (born May 26, 1948) is an American singer-songwriter.

Nicks is best known for her work as a songwriter and vocalist with Fleetwood Mac, and also for her chart-topping solo career. She is known for her distinctive voice, mystical stage persona and poetic, symbolic lyrics. Collectively, her work both as a member of Fleetwood Mac and as a solo artist has produced over 40 top-50 hits and sold over 140 million records, making her one of the best selling music acts of all time with Fleetwood Mac.

Nicks has been named one of the 100 Greatest Songwriters of All Time, and as one of the world’s top “100 Greatest Singers of All Time” by Rolling Stone. As a member of Fleetwood Mac, she was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1998. She has garnered eight Grammy Award nominations and two American Music Award nominations as a solo artist. She has won numerous awards with Fleetwood Mac, including a Grammy Award and five Grammy Award nominations.

Stephanie “Stevie” Nicks was born at Good Samaritan Hospital in Phoenix, Arizona, to Jess Nicks (July 2, 1925 – August 10, 2005), former president of Greyhound’s Armour-Dial, and Barbara Nicks (November 12, 1927 – December 29, 2011), a homemaker. Nicks’s grandfather, Aaron Jess “A.J.” Nicks, Sr. (May 18, 1892 – August 1, 1974), a struggling country music singer, taught Nicks to sing duets with him by the time she was four years old. Nicks’s mother was so protective that she kept her at home “more than most people” and during that time fostered in her daughter a love of fairy tales. The infant Stephanie could pronounce her own name only as “tee-dee,” which led to her nickname of “Stevie”. Her father’s frequent relocation as a food business executive had the family living in Phoenix, Albuquerque, El Paso, Salt Lake City, Los Angeles, and San Francisco during Nicks’s youth. With the Goya guitar that she received for her 16th birthday, Nicks wrote her first song, “I’ve Loved and I’ve Lost, and I’m Sad But Not Blue”. She spent her adolescence playing records constantly, and lived in her “own little musical world.

Mark Lavon “Levon” Helm (May 26, 1940 – April 19, 2012) was an American musician and actor who achieved fame as the drummer and one of the vocalists for The Band. Helm was known for his deeply soulful, country-accented voice, multi-instrumental ability, and creative drumming style, highlighted on many of the Band’s recordings, such as “The Weight“, “Up on Cripple Creek“, and “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down“.

Helm also had a successful career as a film actor, appearing as Loretta Lynn‘s father in Coal Miner’s Daughter, as Chuck Yeager‘s friend and colleague Captain Jack Ridley in The Right Stuff, and as a Tennessee firearms expert in Shooter.

In 1998, Helm was diagnosed with throat cancer, which caused him to lose his singing voice. After treatment, his cancer eventually went into remission, and he gradually regained the use of his voice. His 2007 comeback album Dirt Farmer earned the Grammy Award for Best Traditional Folk Album in February 2008, and in November of that year, Rolling Stone magazine ranked him No. 91 in its list of 100 Greatest Singers of All Time. In 2010, Electric Dirt, his 2009 follow-up to Dirt Farmer, won the first Grammy Award for Best Americana Album, a category inaugurated in 2010. In 2011, his live album Ramble at the Ryman won the Grammy in the same category. On April 17, 2012, his wife and daughter announced on Helm’s website that he was “in the final stages of his battle with cancer” and thanked fans while requesting prayers. Two days later, Helm died at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City.

Born in Elaine, Arkansas, Helm grew up in Turkey Scratch, a hamlet of Marvell, Arkansas. His parents, Nell and Diamond Helm, were cotton farmers and great lovers of music. They encouraged their children to play and sing at a young age. Young Lavon (as he was christened) began playing the guitar at the age of eight and also played drums during his formative years. He saw Bill Monroe and His Blue Grass Boys at the age of six and decided then to become a musician.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RDnlU6rPfwY

Miles Dewey Davis III (May 26, 1926 – September 28, 1991) was an American jazz trumpeter, bandleader, and composer. He is among the most influential and acclaimed figures in the history of jazz and 20th century music. Davis adopted a variety of musical directions in his five-decade career which kept him at the forefront of a number of major stylistic developments in jazz.

Born and raised in Illinois, Davis left his studies at The Juilliard School in New York City and made his professional debut as a member of saxophonist Charlie Parker‘s bebop quintet from 1944 to 1948. Shortly after, he recorded the Birth of the Cool sessions for Capitol Records, which were instrumental to the development of cool jazz. In the early 1950s, Davis recorded some of the earliest hard bop music while on Prestige Records but did so haphazardly due to a heroin addiction. After a widely acclaimed comeback performance at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1955, he signed a long-term contract with Columbia Records and recorded the 1957 album ‘Round About Midnight. It was his first work with saxophonist John Coltrane and bassist Paul Chambers, key members of the sextet he led into the early 1960s. During this period, he alternated between orchestral jazz collaborations with arranger Gil Evans, such as the Spanish-influenced Sketches of Spain (1960), and band recordings, such as Milestones (1958) and Kind of Blue (1959). The latter recording remains one of the most popular jazz albums of all time, having sold over four million copies in the U.S.

Miles Dewey Davis III was born on May 26, 1926, to an affluent African-American family in Alton, Illinois, fifteen miles north of St. Louis. He had an older sister, Dorothy Mae (born 1925), and a younger brother, Vernon (born 1929). His mother, Cleota Mae Henry of Arkansas, was a music teacher and violinist, and his father, Miles Dewey Davis Jr., also of Arkansas, was a dentist. They owned a 200-acre estate near Pine Bluff, Arkansas with a profitable pig farm. In Pine Bluff, he and his siblings fished, hunted, and rode horses. In 1927, the family moved to East St. Louis, Illinois. They lived on the second floor of a commercial building behind a dental office in a predominantly white neighborhood. From 1932 to 1934, Davis attended John Robinson Elementary School, an all-black school, then Crispus Attucks, where he performed well in mathematics, music, and sports. At an early age he liked music, especially blues, big bands, and gospel.